Well now the poor old guy we called is going to be really confused. I almost feel bad...
Shaun On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 3:17 PM, Jason Hunter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Thanks to everyone who let us know about the "terrance melton carver" user > generating lots of mails to the [email protected] list. We've stopped > the traffic, and we want to apologize. > > The mails were the result of a coding error, not a malicious person. > > The "terrance" account was designed to silently listen to the mailing list > in order to produce an archive record for markmail.org. The account was not > designed to send email. The only time it is allowed to send email is to (a) > confirm its subscription and (b) confirm its unsubscription. > > What happened this morning is that a regular user sent an email soliciting > an unsubscribe confirmation: > http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=users&msgNo=184018 > > That message caused the "terrance" account to think it was being asked to > leave the list. So it responded in the affirmative. The account then saw > its own reply, and responded in the affirmative. Repeat. Repeat. It > generated noise like bad microphone feedback, and we're very sorry. > > The "terrance" code is supposed to only respond to "authoritative" emails -- > not emails from regular users, and certainly not messages from itself. > Somehow all these emails today were seen as "authoritative" and we're > working to figure out why. > > We've been operating markmail.org for about 10 months now, listening to and > archiving more than 4,000 lists, and this is the first time anything like > this has happened. It's especially disappointing that it had to happen on > one of the most widely subscribed lists and before you guys had a chance to > get to know us. We just started this month working with Sun and CollabNet > to get the OpenOffice lists archived. > > Again, we're sorry. The last thing we ever intended was to generate noise > on a list. > > -jh- > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
